SLSL "TSR" "what I dislike about my writing "

[jbor]

>> Most of what I dislike about my writing is present
>> here in embroyo, as well as in more advanced forms. I
>> failed to recognize, just for openers, that the main
>> character's problem was real and interesting enough to
>> generate a story on its own. Apparently I felt I had
>> to put on a whole extra overlay of rain images and
>> references to "The Waste Land" and _A Farewell to
>> Arms_. I was operating on the motto "Make it
>> literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by
>> myself and then took. (4)

I don't think this is tongue in cheek at all. In the first part of the
paragraph Pynchon specifies the source of the story:

        "The Small Rain" was my first published story. A friend
    who'd been in the army the same two years I'd been in the navy
    supplied the details. The hurricane really happened, and my
    friend's Signal Corps detachment had the mission described in the
    story.

A few things of note here. With the point that it was his "first published
story" I think it's safe to assume he'd written others, which were
unpublished, by this time. The fact that Pynchon deferred to a friend's
account of his experiences rather than his own goes to the later comments in
the 'Intro' about adopting a "strategy of transfer" and "displacing my
personal experiences" out of "an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then
to be 'too autobiographical'" (21). But the main point of the paragraph is
that the "hurricane really happened" and that the events and experiences
depicted are 'real'. He was using a realistic method, perhaps even striving
for a type of 'realism' in the writing of this story. Then he goes on to
describe how he botched it up.

The overt references to two authors who *Pynchon* liked at the time, Eliot
and Hemingway, are there at the end of the text, but he inserts these
references into a conversation between the characters. Even though it's
Rizzo, the "company intellectual" (36), who makes the remark, the dialogue
still doesn't ring true at all. And it's a pretty obvious and superficial
way of alerting the (unobservant?) reader to the fact that the "literary"
theme/s and/or style of the story she or he has just read hinges on a
combination of 'The Waste Land' and _A Farewell to Arms_. (Pynchon often
defers to contemporary or recent works which he likes in his subsequent
works as well: Reed's _Mumbo Jumbo_ in _GR_ and Eco's _The Name of the Rose_
in _M&D_ are another two examples I can think of off the top of my head. The
references to these two - reference to author and allusion to text
respectively - are similarly superficial and obvious in Pynchon's own text,
but are presented as a sort of a sideshow rather than as a part of the main
performance as they are here.)

The references (i.e. allusions) to the 'The Waste Land' and _A Farewell to
Arms_ throughout the story are superfluous to the plot and setting of the
actual story Pynchon retells (they're also not particularly well done), and
the "rain images" (and accompanying heat and aridness imagery) are excessive
and not really that appropriate in the context of a hurricane's aftermath.
For example, how realistic is it that Fort Roach would be a desert
wasteland, particularly after a hurricane storm cell has just passed through
the region? But Pynchon needed to turn it into one to make this "literary"
overlay work.

He writes that "the main character's problem was real and interesting
enough" without adding in all the extraneous "literary" stuff. The
representation of Levine's inertia and ennui, and then his snapping out of
it when he goes AWOL and spontaneously hops onto the tug to help gather in
the corpses, is the "real and interesting" focus of the story, and there is
some hope (muted though it may be) for him at the end.

best